Hatred for Mankind

The Beatles once proclaimed that "all you need is love," but ask Liverpool, England's Dragged into Sunlight for their view of the world, and they'd surely assert the exact opposite: that all you need is HATE. After all, misanthropy of the highest order is very much the driving force behind the group's 2011 debut album, Hatred for Mankind (see, it says so right there!), which is also presented with an album cover so gratuitously gruesome, one can't help but wonder if the band is just having a laugh. But while this suspicion gains some strength as one reviews semi-comical song titles like "Boiled Angel" and "Volcanic Birth," the sheer fury of the music that backs them suggests these guys mean business instead, not a wink or snicker among them. Only time will tell, but for now what is certain is that Dragged into Sunlight (whose musicians hide their identities behind one-letter pseudonyms) incorporate every possible gimmick in the extreme metal canon in their bid for complete devastation: i.e., the most vicious black metal, the most discordant blackened sludgecore, the most suffocating death/doom, as well as every terrifying vocal style known to man and demon alike (not to mention disconcerting spoken lines nicked from obscure movies). But, far from resulting in a one-dimensional musical tar pit, so murky that nothing worthwhile can be discerned out of its depths, the group is able to invest enough dynamic variety and a vast catalog of fetching guitar riffs to stretch a few songs ("Lashed to the Grinder and Stoned to Death," "I, Aurora") well past the ten-minute mark, while cramming every last ounce of their glorious brutality into the especially pulverizing "Buried with Leeches." By the time it's all said and done (or rather, screamed and dead), the closest comparison one might find for Dragged into Sunlight's nuclear blast-zone approach to composing is Birmingham's Anaal Nathrakh, minus the industrial touches. So with that sort of unapologetic annihilation in mind, listeners are encouraged to take its warning to heart and approach Hatred for Mankind with extreme caution. One thing's certain: John, Paul, George, and Ringo would surely disapprove.